78
PARTISAN REVIEW
I
Know
My
Love
is a confection whipped up by S. N. Behrman
for Lynn Fontanne and Alfred Lunt. The base is a play by Marcel
Achard, but I should judge that little is left of the original except an air
of continental sophistication which merely adds another note of unreal–
ity to this "Boston Story" of a couple married for fifty years and look–
ing back. One enjoys watching it, to shift the metaphor temporarily,
as one might enjoy watching a show of toy dogs and noting their points
(Miss Fontanne gets the blue ribbon; and you can imagine how
becom–
ing
it is, my dear) but one wonders afterward why so much skill, effort
and money should be wasted on a
petit four
and why S. N. Behrman
should be content merely to be the pastry cook for two spoiled and self–
indulgent "darlings of the theater."
There are only two plays on Broadway (as of early December) that
qualify as serious, and they would rate as no more than interesting ex–
periments if the Broadway theater were a lively art instead of a sickly
survival corrupted more and more by the "values" of the entertain–
ment industry and of the audiences that entertainment has conjured up.
One is
new-The B<rowning Version
by Terence Rattigan, in which
Maurice Evans and Edna Best play the leading roles. The other is old–
August Strindberg's
The Father,
with Raymond Massey and Mady Chris–
tians. Both are highly contemporary in that they deal with the relation
between male and female which is coming to be acknowledged-and
I am not being facetious-as one of the significant battles of the cen–
tury; and both attempt to deal with it on the adult level.
The Browning
Version
is a one-act tour de force in which a master in a boys' school dis–
covers that his wife's contemptuous opinion of him, with which she has
beaten him down for years, is not necessarily the world's opinion, though
she has tried to make it so to the point where he has lost his job. He
turns upon her, makes common cause with her lover who knows how
contemptible she is, and throws her out of his life. The play attempts
too much in one act- but at least Rattigan knew what he was attempt–
ing and Evans and Best bring it off rather well.
The Father
is a more ambitious experiment, not quite successful,
but very interesting. In this case the wife, in order to get control of her
child's future, sets out to drive her husband insane. But it is not nearly
so simple as that. In fact
The Father
explores, however awkwardly, so
many areas of emotion and idea that one finds oneself thinking about the
play long after one has seen it-a rare experience these days. The wife
succeeds in driving the husband, so to speak formally insane, by plant–
ing in his mind a doubt of their child's paternity, of any child's pater-
